Good news on global education, water access, coral restoration
As you know, our friends at Australia’s Fix the News are all about rebalancing the news away from “if it bleeds, it leads.”
In the free section of this edition, Fix the News writes: “If you feel like the world is getting more dangerous, more violent and more chaotic, that’s not an accident. News organizations have engineered that feeling, and the distortion is worse than you think.
“A new analysis from the team at Our World in Data tracked every article published by the New York Times, Washington Post and Fox News in 2023, and compared their coverage to what Americans actually die from.”
“Heart disease and cancer together accounted for 56 percent of deaths in America. They received 7 percent of media coverage. Terrorism killed 16 people in the U.S. that year. Sixteen. It got more attention than heart disease, cancer, stroke, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, kidney disease, and liver disease combined. In fact, terrorism received 18,000 times more coverage than its share of deaths, while homicides were overrepresented by a factor of 43.”
“The reason is obvious once you’re aware of it. Heart disease kills 2,000 Americans every single day, which means it isn’t news, because it isn’t new.”
“People who die in rare, violent events become stories, with faces and names, and we click on those stories, which tells news organizations to publish more of them.”
As usual, I’ll leave the other 15 or so items in Fix the News’ free section to you. Here’s a quick sampler from the 30 items in the section requiring a subscription:
— About 9 in 10 children worldwide now are enrolled in primary school, up from barely a third in 1900, Our World in Data reports, citing UNESCO data. And the gender gap that once defined access to school has nearly disappeared. In 1900, about 31 percent of boys and 23 percent of girls were in school; today, enrollment is at 91 percent for boys and 89 percent for girls.
— The Global Water Security and Sanitation Partnership, a multi-donor trust fund administered by the World Bank’s Water Department, is working to achieve universal access to clean water and sanitation.
“Across its active portfolio, 75.5 million additional people have benefited from safer water, sanitation or hygiene services in the last year, with climate resilience now embedded in nearly all new projects,” says Fix the News, citing a World Bank Group report.
— A breakthrough in coral restoration is giving new hope for degraded sections of the Great Barrier Reef, where millions of coral larvae now have a greater chance of survival thanks to a novel innovation known as the “larval seedbox,” reports Oceanographic Magazine.
Developed by Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO, in collaboration with Southern Cross University, the larval seedbox acts “as a kind of nursery and delivery system” for coral larvae, delaying their dispersal and enabling them to settle more effectively in targeted reef zones, Oceanographic Magazine says.
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